Unsupported Speculation

Two weeks ago, I went on a walk along one of our country roads here to try to condition my feet for long hikes, because I’m weird like that. To give myself something to do, I decided to just shoot the bearings (a maritime term for determining the bearing 000-360 towards something with a compass or similar tool) towards the cellphone towers we have on some of the mountains here, and when I got home, I could determine my place on the road by plotting a line (another nautical term for using a straight rule and a pencil to make a line on a map) from the cell tower to the road at the correct bearing.

This type of navigation is interesting and easy on land, because as long as you know what road you are on, the road itself provides one axis you need, and the bearing towards an identifiable landmark provides the other. In other words, use a compass, get the bearing of a known landmark, and mark a line from the known landmark and back to the road you’re on, and you know where you are on the road. Yey.

So while I was walking along the road, I jotting the bearings of the cell towers onto a bad Polaroid picture that was completely white. I used a type of pen I’d bought called a Pilot Frixion Fineliner. I’d heard about these on YouTube, and the military uses them to write information onto transparent map pouches because the ink is erasable.

You see, the ink is some sort of special formula that when it is heated past a certain point, it completely loses its color, becoming transparent itself. So the Pilot company puts rubber “erasers” on these pens, and the friction of rubbing the ink with the “eraser” raises the ink’s temperature past something like 80 degrees fahrenheit, and the ink disappears.

This was the inception of an idea of an erasable notepad that was a little better than a bad Polaroid. The second element I needed was when I wanted to see if I could erase Frixion pen ink from a medical nurse’s note slap bracelet I had. I’d bought one of these things to see if it was useful being able to keep notes on my wrist. They’re like an 80’s slap bracelet, but sheathed in silicone, and you can write and erase, so that nurses can keep details of whatever the frek they do on their wrists while running around all over the place.

So I wrote on the silicone slap bracelet, and tried to use the eraser on it, and it did erase, but not completely. The bracelet is white, and so a faint grey smear on it was bothersome. It was a mild OCD-inducing failure, so I put it away and did something else for a moment, but then I remembered that silicone was extremely heat resistant. What if I could use a BIC lighter on it?

I got a BIC, and lapped the flame over the grey smear, and it disappeared. Then I wrote words back on the silicone bracelet and used the BIC on it again, and they were GONE! Holy crap!

So I’d been thinking about this idea that would have gotten me burned at the stake several hundred years ago. I don’t really like wearing the slap bracelet. It works, but not quite well enough for me. You can’t write on it easily while the bracelet is still on your wrist, and then this means taking it off and locking it into the straight position to write something on it and slapping it back onto your wrist. It becomes a mild pain-in-the-butt over time.

What I needed was a notepad, so eventually I started browsing the internet for what I needed to throw together to make something out of silicone for keeping notes. What I came up with was a white silicone sheet that was large enough to cut rectangles from, and a metal cigarette case.

I decided at first I was going to make a diptych. What the frek is that? I learned about these from Roman wax tablets, which were an ancient Roman method of being able to write things into tablets of melted beeswax with a stylus. The stylus would be pointed at one end, and flat at the other, and when you needed to erase, you just used the flat end to smooth the writing out in the wax.

The tablets were made out of panels of wood with an enclosed area in the panel for pouring in melted wax, where then it would cool, and you had a writing surface. Some people back then used them in a diptych configuration, which meant you had two panels bound together so that you could open and close the wax tablets like a book.

I had one of these years ago, but in modern practice, they are curiously difficult to use today, because in our current times we lack sorts of ancient Roman ‘office supplies’ which were common back then, which were heating tables that were perfectly level, as well as perfectly level tables generally (apparently the Romans were crazy about leveling).

Whenever your wax tablet started to look a little too rough (because beeswax starts to look progressively worse the more you distort it with writing and smoothing), the Romans would set it face up on one of these heated tables, and the wax would melt within the tablet’s enclosed area, and then you would take it off carefully and let the wax cool, and voila, you had a pristine wax tablet again.

Because these heated tables were perfectly level, then the wax wouldn’t pool to one side of the tablet and run out. Then when the heat source was removed from the table or the tablet was transferred to another completely level table, it would dry evenly without it being irritatingly thicker on one side of the wax and thinner on the other.

Sadly, we live in a dark period of human history, and in this foul epoch of our times, almost no tables are perfectly level, making wax tablets somewhat dissatisfying to use. I gave them up eventually.

I had a wax tablet diptych, and for my new silicone notepad, I wanted to make another one, so I could keep it in my pocket, and open and close it like a book, and this would also protect the ink from being in contact with other things that would smear it slightly, because when it is written onto silicone, it is a little prone to mild smearing.

So again, I ordered a white silicone sheet and a metal cigarette case. When it arrived today, I removed the metal thing from the cigarette case that was intended to hold the cigarettes within the case, leaving me with a thin box. Then I cut the silicone and pasted in into both the interior and lid of the case with 3M Super 77 spray glue.

After that, to test it, I wrote the nefarious words, “Jeff is trouble, do something about him”, and then got my BIC out and ran the flame over those incriminating words, and they disappeared!

If you want to make one, some important but speculative advice is that you should literally purchase Pilot Frixion FINELINER MARKER PENS. The reason is because I think the formula of the ink is different for marker pens than it is for the Frixion ballpoint pens, and the marker ink actually disappears when flame is applied to it, while the ballpoint pen ink leaves a small trace. This is probably because it is a slightly altered formula for the ballpoint pens to enable the ink to flow better through that kind of tip, but the consequence is that it it not as erasable for some durned reason.

That’s all. My new notepad is nice. Fits in the pocket comfortably. Have an excuse to have an EDC hobby again. Don’t need paper. No interesting tidbits about my life left in my trash for private investigators looking for Jeff to discover after stealing my garbage bags.

A fully successful project.

Update: I re-tested Frixion ballpoint pens on silicone, and I was able to get it to erase completely using a BIC lighter, but I found that I couldn’t do this on old Frixion ink writing because the ink may have been old. Thus, you may need to keep in mind that like a dry-erase marker, if Frixion ink is left on silicone too long, it may lose its ability to be erased with heat, and be more difficult to remove, and you’ll have to search the internet for a way to clean it off.